Civil War Medicine

We're all sick of it. Being locked in our houses, locked out of the lives of those we love. I just want to walk out the door and keep going. Except for the getting sick and dying part.

If I can’t just up and run, at least I want to think about what we’re doing to make it better so that one day we can get back to normal. I want to read thoughtful pieces by sensible people thinking out loud about how best to work our way through this. I don’t want to fight about it. We’re not the enemy, COVID is.

Except that’s not true, is it? We are the enemy. For both understandable and baffling reasons we can’t all agree on what to do. Vaccinate? Mask up? Send the kids to school? Go back to work at the office?

The science isn’t all that hard. Yes, get vaccinated. Yes, wear masks in many situations. Be careful and plod along until this thing runs out of hosts. Support each other in the process so that as many of us as possible, people and businesses, survive.

So, where does a program of giving unemployment benefits to those who are fired from their jobs because they refuse to get vaccinated, recently adopted by five or six southern states, fit into that plan? Doesn’t that just give people an incentive to do exactly the wrong thing for the common good?

Yes, of course it does.

So, why?

Well, I think you know the answer to that.

A virus worse than COVID has infected us. Its symptoms are a kind of rabies like madness. Those suffering from it are determined to do what they damn well please, no matter the cost to others. 

We’d never have won WW II with that attitude. We’d never have pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression with that selfishness.

And we won’t beat COVID that way. The misery will be prolonged in the name of personal freedom. 

To Make America Great Again, we must purge it. That seems to be the thinking, if you can call it that. The country has a sepsis of liberalism that is poisoning our freedoms.

What doctors often have to do to treat sepsis is cut off limbs. Where should we start? Hands or feet?

A Helping Hand

How do you help someone you feel you should help, you want to help, but whom you fear has a problem only they can solve? What are the limits of emotional support? Of financial support? When are you helping and when are you enabling poor choices?

Joe Manchin doesn’t want us to become an entitlement society. Maybe that’s a sincere conservative belief of his, or maybe it’s an excuse to look away from people in need. 

When I know someone who is obviously in trouble with addiction, am I just making excuses for doing nothing when I say they are the only one who can help themselves? “They have to hit bottom” we say. The bottom of what? Their graves?

Two very close members of my family struggled with alcohol and drugs. I rushed to the rescue of both of them, taking them to rehab, helping them find better doctors. Maybe I helped them in the moment, but both continued to struggle for years longer. Other people did what they could. A friend sponsored one in AA. A spouse said they were leaving if things didn’t change.

We want to fix things for people who need help. We want to give them money and tell them to spend it wisely and get back on the right track. When they don’t, we’re disappointed. Often we give up. We gave them a chance to get better, we say to ourselves. It’s out of our hands if they didn’t want to take it.

What makes people change? The conventional wisdom, a term coined a half century ago by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is that people don’t change until they have to. Until the need for change hits them in the face. 

Galbraith was right. Our foot-dragging on dealing with climate change is a good example. In the business world, where change often comes fast, company after company has doggedly clung to its comfortable old ways until the last one out of the plant turned out the lights forever.

What was the tipping point for my family members who needed to change or die? They did get pretty low, so maybe they proved Galbraith’s point. But along the way, help from friends and family kept hope alive until they were able to save themselves. Many aren’t so lucky. They have no support systems to sustain hope. They die of alcoholism. They die of drug overdoses. They die of poverty.

Poverty? That isn’t the same as addiction, you say. No one is addicted to being poor. But is it that different? Addiction traps you. Poverty traps you in a different way, but just as mercilessly. People need help to get out of traps. Someone to loosen the steel jaws so they can limp away and recover.

One of my family members told me that even when they were sinking lower and lower, words of encouragement stayed with them. They helped them get through the darkest times. They helped them make it to the point when they could help themselves. 

That’s what Joe Manchin is not giving enough credit to. It’s tough for people to change, tough to break out of debilitating behaviors or circumstances. It’s not a lack of character holding them back, as he believes, it’s just everything. The booze. The drugs. The poverty. 

Overcoming addiction and poverty—sometimes just surviving—is hard work. We need all the help we can give one another.

What if Everyone Crowded Into a Redneck Bar?

I grew up in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and early 60s. Black men stepped off the sidewalk to let white men pass. Everybody’s maid was a black woman. Sometimes they wore little white caps like servants to British aristocrats. The racial order was well established and taken for granted. The sexual order too: women stayed home and took care of their men and children.

The attitude of well-off whites toward blacks and women wasn’t hatred. That wasn’t necessary. Everyone knew their place and stayed in it. But in the country bars where the air was thick with the lust and free-floating rage of young men with too many hormones and too much beer in their bellies, things could get nasty pretty quickly. You didn’t want to be a black man in one of those bars. You didn’t want to be private-school white boy either. “What are you looking at,” was a common greeting.

I wasn’t allowed in the men’s grill at the country club, but from the times I was in there with my father, I thought it wasn’t a place I wanted to be either. Those men weren’t likely to punch you or cut you, but they were as quick with a demeaning joke about blacks and women, and Jews, as those redneck barflies.

That’s just the way it was in the Deep South in 1959, the year I started high school.

The other big part of life in the South in those days was religion. Everyone went to church, to see and be seen. The sermons were high-minded Christian dogma about the golden rule. Everyone prayed the psalms and sang the hymns. I can’t speak for myself, because I was an atheist even then, so it was all a bit like participative performance art to me, but my impression was that those around me were impressed with their piety and charity toward their fellow man.

When racism and sexism leaked out of the redneck bars and country club men’s grills, it washed up on the rocks of that sanctimonious piety. Someone would have too many martinis and get a little too colorful at a suburban party and the host would ask a friend to drive him home, bless his heart. Polite company wasn’t the place for that kind of thing.

So to get a thorough indoctrination in racial hatred and sexism, you had to go to those country bars or country club men’s grills. They were self limiting. Like a localized tumor that couldn’t easily metastasize.

But now we have social media, and we’re all plugged into it all the time. We’re drunk on it. And it’s making us mad. Perversely, that’s a big part of it’s appeal. Making us mad is a moneymaker for its sponsors.

Here’s what Roger McNamee, an early advisor to Mark Zuckerberg, says:

The problem is that the underlying business model of Facebook, where you bring three billion people onto one network with no boundaries and no safety net, then combine that with a business model that's based on essentially promoting emotionally intense content in order to promote engagement, and then add into that the ability to target people with extreme precision. And the result is that an enormous number of ideas that have lived for years at the fringes of society — things like white supremacy and anti-vax — have suddenly been thrust into the mainstream and done huge damage. *

I had friends who went into those country bars of my high-school years and basically never came out. Now it seems like we’re all doing it. 

Somehow we need to find a way to sober up.

______________

* Interview with Julia Chatterley, CNN Business, October 26, 2021 

My Madness

My madness isn’t constant. At least I don’t think it is. It’s episodic. Its root cause is my compulsiveness.

I’m afflicted with a gift for seeing straight lines. This means that when I have work done in my house, I see if it’s out of square. I notice the change in luster if the paint is too thin. My feet feel a floor out of level or a piece of limestone that is a bit too high on one side. I’m forever hovering over workers, to their and my dismay. I know I should probably stay out of their hair until they finish, and then check, but it always seems easier to try to get it right the first time.

I don’t do this with doctors. If a surgeon is well trained, has a brilliant reputation in their field, and is recommended by someone I trust (usually another doctor), I listen to what they plan to do, ask a few questions to be sure I understand what’s being recommended and why, and then I let them do their job. I don’t google my problem and quiz them based on what I read on the internet.

In fact, I spend more time scouring online reviews of cheap electronics. 

When I was a lawyer, I worked on big mergers and financings. My firm was new to some of the more exotic financing approaches, so I spent a long time learning the craft. It was like looking for straight lines and level floors on every page of the documents. It was tedious and a little terrifying…and exhausting. Eventually I realized that if we were going to do these deals over and over, we needed to standardize our forms and procedures. So we did that. The young lawyers working on the deals with me became experts. They did the work on hundreds of deals and only came to me with the problems. As we worked together and I saw their skill firsthand, I came to trust them. I didn’t have to hover over them. I knew they would do the job right.

I couldn’t have done it any other way. Certainly not as a practical matter. If I’d been involved in the details of every deal, I would have been a bottleneck. But also I would have driven myself crazy.

So that’s what I’ve learned about myself. If I’m to maintain my sanity, I have to let others do things for me and not stand over them while they do it. The trick is to make sure I have confidence in the people I’m relying on.

If I haven’t trained them myself, though, or know someone outstanding has, it’s hard for me to depend on others. To come back to where we started—home improvement—sometimes it can be so hard to find good people that I just hire and hope. After all, it’s only a window replacement or a drywall patch, not major surgery. 

But the lines have to be straight and the paint smooth. And if it’s up to me to make sure they are…well, let me just say this to all the workers I have held to my perfectionist standards over the years: I’m sorry, I can’t help myself.

The Wisdom of Solomon

I watched an episode of Grantchester that had a happy ending that left me sad. Do you know the show? Set in an English village in the 1950s, a priest and a detective, each with their own demons, are a crime-solving pair. In this episode two couples want the same baby. An adoption agent dies and it could be murder. It was an accident, as it turns out, and after a good bit of wise counseling by our priest-detective duo, the final scene is a christening with both couples in attendance and the priest telling the story of Solomon and the child claimed by two women. In Grantchester, there was no need to split the baby; they shared it.

So what made me sad about that?

The biological parents were not married and the dad was a good hearted n’er-do-well. The would-be adoptive parents were well-off; the man desperately wanted a son, but his wife was just fine with no children in the house. The solution? One couple raises the child, the other provides financial support so the boy has a good chance to make something of himself.

It was a good piece of story-telling. You felt the longing and pain of both couples, so the ending that gave them each some of what they wanted and needed was particularly satisfying.

So what about that made me sad? 

Look around. We aren’t doing that these days. We aren’t compromising. We aren’t honoring the feelings of others. We aren’t trying to understand them. Push them aside, take them to court, that’s what we’re doing.

The priest and the detective from Grantchester would be appalled. In their village there is all the bigotry, hate and murderous rage we face today, but somehow they manage to talk to one another, to try to understand one another, to see their common humanity.

We’re not doing that. That’s what makes me sad.

Oh, what a foolish dreamer you must think me, to be so naive as to believe life could ever be like a moralizing tv show. To which I say, how can we accept that it is not?

I Really Do Care, And You Do Too

We didn’t need Melania’s green-jacket pronouncement of her personal lack of interest in the rest of us to suspect as much. Some people just seem to not give much of a damn about others. She might be one of them. Her husband another. Aren’t they cute? A perfect pair.

Most of us do care, though. It’s hard wired into us by evolution. Those who survived to propagate were the ones who took care of one another.

The speed of modern life has short-circuited evolution, or at least our ability to understand what is happening to us now. It’s hard to think in terms of swimming out of the sea to walk on land or shedding prehensile tails when the daily news cycle is screaming apocalypse now.

A lot of us are very angry at others. One wonders what happened to our evolutionary imperative to look after one another. Are we evolving away from it? Will we survive without it?

Almost all of us look after our children. Most of us look after other family members, after a suitable cooling off period following Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Joe from back home. On down the line of concern, we might drop a dollar in the Salvation Army holiday collection bucket. Some days that might be about as far as our concern goes.

If indeed we are that unconcerned with how the less-fortunate among us are faring, why does it make me so mad that some people seem determined to stand in the way of helping those who obviously need help? Joe Biden wants to make investments in medical care and child care for those who can afford neither. These initiatives would make us more healthy and productive over the long run, so they should be an easy sell. They are also humane. Another easy sell.

But that’s not the way approximately half the country sees things. I’m not sure if they don’t believe the long-term economic benefits of having a healthy population that has child care so they can go to work, or if they just aren’t into being humane. At least not to “those folks.” And you know who they mean by that.

A related question might be: why do I care? No one in my family needs Medicaid or free child care. Leaving aside his sensible climate policies, the Biden plan is not designed to help me. If fact, the tax increases to pay for it will hurt me.

And yet, I can’t read the news without getting frustrated that we seem so determined not to help one another. When did we get like that? Did Darwin take a break?

Perhaps the answer is that most of us never cared about more than our families and friends. Everyone else was just a statistic. We don’t love statistics. Or mourn them.

What, then, gives a push to big social programs like Roosevelt’s New Deal? Does it take the widespread suffering of the Great Depression to make us care? Does it take the fear of “there but for fortune go I”? Lyndon Johnson wanted to do something like the New Deal, a program he called the Great Society. That went nowhere. The Vietnam war took all his political juice, and we weren’t in the middle of a depression.

Is it only politicians who want to get elected who offer to do good for others? And their political opponents who find fault with that? So that we’re locked in the push and pull and bombast of stump speeches, divorced from genuine notions of the common good. Do we even believe there is a common good?

Or is it just what’s good for each of us individually and those we love? Those other people are just that: other people. They can look after themselves. That seems to be a common sentiment. Along with the implicit idea that if they need help they aren’t trying hard enough. “God helps those who help themselves,” comes to mind as a rationalization for looking away from the needs of others. Also, “Charity begins at home.”

We have so many good reasons for not helping. For not caring about the plights of others. The truth is that their plight is our plight. Too often, though, we don’t come to that realization until it’s too late. Until, as Martin Niemöller so powerfully wrote, “Then they came for me.”

What Do You Do When There's Nothing You Can Do?

I have a friend who thinks homo sapiens are headed for extinction. He says we have evolved  to be able to invent ever more ingenious ways to consume our resources—essentially, the planet—but, like drug users and narcissists, without the wisdom or willpower to manage our addiction.

Found dead in a hot, dry ditch: humanity.

That long view is the most entertaining way to consider our maladies. It won’t happen to us, we can tell ourselves. Or our children.

But of course it is already happening to many of us. The low-lying poor are already drowning. Farmers in the American southwest and west are already parched; the general population may not be far behind. And the situation is worse in much of the world.

Which brings me to politics, because politics is how we solve problems, at least the ones that require government coordination and funding. I don’t have to remind you how that’s going. As usual, we can’t make up our minds how big the problem is or what to do about it. Slowly boiling frogs come to mind.

If we step back from existential problems and politics, to consider the stuff of everyday life, things aren’t much better. Over the course of the last few hundred years, we have made substantial progress globally on increasing literacy and reducing poverty. But our developed-world problems—like voting and women’s rights—are becoming more, not less, intractable. The world may be more literate, overall, but the Republican party seems to have lost its wits altogether.

Being in government now has got to be frustrating. Most went there, I assume, to make a difference. Few, not counting Mitch McConnell, will. And the only difference old Mitch is making is in making it harder for minorities to vote and women to have reproductive agency. Now his hand-picked Supreme Court has taken up doing the heavy lifting for him and his kind. His kind being old white men who used to rule the world—still do, unfortunately—and are fighting like Cersei Lannister to stay on the throne.

I have another friend whose approach to our looming climate disaster is to try to get arrested. He chains himself to pipelines and pickets the banks financing them. They keep pumping oil and cash while he makes bail.

Dramatic acts to call attention to problems only make a difference if anyone cares. That is, anyone who can do anything about it. See above about coal-country king McConnell.

We’re in a tough spot right now. Politics is the Hatfields and McCoys. Meanwhile the world burns, women are forced to have babies they don’t want and people in the south can’t find their poling place, which was moved miles away from their home and is closed by the time they get off work.

What can we do about it? Hell, I don’t know, but we’d better do something. At least we should try to make it a better, more compassionate place for those less fortunate than we are. That takes a village, as Hillary famously (and correctly) said. We may still slowly boil, but we might as well treat each other fairly and with dignity while we cook.

I guess that starts in the local coffee shop, next time we see someone wearing a mask, or not. Next time we walk past a homeless encampment and look the other way. Even, in my case, next time I feel the impulse to say what absolute jerks some people are. That might be making me feel better, but it’s not helping.

Pretty is as pretty does, my grandmother used to say.

Gone

Opening scene: a man texts his daughter a link to a story he thinks she might like. Above it, on his computer screen, can be seen other texts to her over a period of months. Cute dog videos (she has a cute one herself), messages to call when she would like to talk (her voicemail is full), other messages asking if she is ok. Mostly she doesn’t reply. Once in a while, for his birthday, for instance, she gets back to him with an apology for not staying in touch.

A gift painted when she was sixteen.

Her mother lives with her now. They share a tiny rent-controlled apartment in L.A., where his daughter moved twenty-five years ago to pursue her dream of being a film actress. She’s talented. She has an MFA in drama from a great university; she acted off Broadway. But she has a bad cocktail of brain chemistry that makes her too anxious to promote herself the way one must to succeed in such a tough occupation.

So her life has shrunk down to 430 square feet shared with her mom and an adorable dog.

Her mom is a godsend. His daughter might not be able to manage on her own. Or maybe she could, but her mom doesn’t think so, so she moved in. That’s both the good news and the bad news, in the father’s opinion.

He divorced her mom thirty-five years ago, when his daughter was fifteen. He thought she was happy and carefree then, but he later learned from her that she had been having problems with anxiety for years. She hid them well. He had no idea. Maybe he should have.

Those problems became brutally apparent soon enough. She tried to succeed. He tried to help. Neither was successful.

Now her mother has taken over his daughter’s care…and her life, it seems. Her mother lives in Atlanta but she hasn’t been home in over a year. His daughter wants nothing to do with Atlanta.

At every turn the father and mother felt the other’s choices weren’t the best ones for their daughter. For thirty-five years her mother has refused to to speak to him, so it’s been impossible to work through those disagreements in the normal way. It might have been impossible in any event; they have pretty different perspectives on how to help. 

And his daughter is her own woman. She’s anxious, but she’s otherwise smart and capable. She knows what she wants. The kind of help her mom is giving her.

So he sends her birthday and holiday gifts and texts her cute videos, wondering for the millionth time how it came to this. Wondering if he’s just a fool. If he could have done more, should have done more. Wondering whether his life with his daughter—the delightful, funny intelligent woman who in their times together has brought joy and light into his life—is essentially over.

Pass it On

I taught one of my boys to play chess. He was five. Within a shockingly short time, he was crushing me. 

I taught another how to improve his odds of getting what he wanted from a merchant...or anyone, really. Be charming and go slow, was the essence of it.

Fishing, tennis, basketball, golf. I taught them all that, with varying degrees of success. The fishing and a brief foray into hunting brought me around to feeling that I didn't want to kill anything, even for food. You can get food at the grocery store. You don’t have to personally murder it. Lately, it has gotten hard to think about anyone penning and slaughtering animals to feed me. For just that empathetic reason, one of my sons is a vegetarian. He taught me, rather than the other way around.

I taught them that their word is their bond. That their personal integrity is as important as eating and breathing. They embraced that lesson, with occasional youthful exceptions for Napster and BitTorrent.

I didn’t teach them math, even though all of them are great at it. I flatter myself that by staying out of their homework I was teaching them self-reliance. I think I was just lazy. Also, not good at math.

My kids are all grown now. None of them want me to teach them anything. I get it. These days I confine myself to lobbing in occasional bits of unsolicited advice. Much appreciated advice, I’m sure. “I’m aware,” one of them is fond of saying, in his charming way. The protege become the master.

I taught them to be kind, even though I was not always. That lesson seems to have stuck. Maybe when I wasn’t kind they saw first-hand how much better it is to be so. 

As I said, the proteges surpass the master.

That’s the best part of it, really: raising kids who are better than you. It’s like a last chance on this earth to atone for your sins, to correct your imperfections. To make the world a better place by leaving behind copies of yourself that aren’t copies at all, but are version 2.0, with more good features, better all around, just the way the original model should have been.

American Mujahideen

Kabul has fallen. Ashraf Ghani has fled Afghanistan. The Afghan army, recruited and trained by America to defend the government it installed and supported, has crumpled like a cheap suit. It didn't fit the country. Burkas are the new must-have fashion.

Meanwhile, as the Taliban demands that Afghan women be masked, in America our political extremists insist that they not be. Not women or children or men. As we are all too painfully aware, the masks that our freedom fighters decry are the ones that save lives. 

As to keeping women in their place, American zealots have other methods for that: don't let them have control over their reproductive choices; don't give them child-care assistance; don't give them equal pay. "Keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" wouldn't be far off the mark as the rallying cry for the American Mujahideen.

Zealots. Is that too strong a word? Aren't they just standing up for what they believe in? Isn't that the American way?

I suppose so. But what they believe in is white-male-paternalism. Not that different, really, than the theocracy of Afghanistan, Iran and many other parts of the world. It masquerades as religion, but what it is really about is men. Men controlling other men, certainly, but most of all men controlling women. If you control the womb, you control the future.

Donald Trump built a big following by stoking fear that Mexico was sending us its criminals and rapists. They're coming for our wives and daughters. They must be met with unmerciful force. Our future as a purebred race is at stake. Sound familiar? It worked for a guy in Germany eighty five years ago.

The quest for religious purity driving the Taliban is no different than our quest for ideological purity in American politics. And it has the same root. Fear of the other. Fear he will rape our women.

The refusenik politics of today is not about libertarianism or religious freedom, it is about keeping women in their place. It is the desperate and terrifying death rattle of the dying hegemony of the patriarchy.

Testosterone and hatred combine to create a powerful stimulant, though. Those on it (including the women who, for whatever reason, follow men there) are hard to stop. Perhaps it is they, not the women who unselfishly give their bodies and lives to the next generation, who need to be kept under wraps.

Independence

I need my country, I know that. It gives me security and opportunity, which are in short supply in many parts of the world. From time to time it has given me idealism and pride. Other times, it has disappointed me. In the same way my charismatic father’s bad behavior disillusioned and disappointed me. I learned of some of his worse misdeeds years after his death, when it was too late to confront him; and too late to undo my boyhood worship of him. 

Cognitive dissonance. That’s what psychologists call what I felt, still feel, for my father. It’s what I feel for my country too.

My relationship with both has been complicated. I loved being on the golf course with my father. I loved Fourth of July fireworks celebrating my country.

But my father had a dark side. He was charming and impulsively generous one moment, lecturing and badgering the next. Pull-up-a-chair-and-sit-down kind of lectures. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” kind of lectures

I didn’t know it at the time—he died at age 50, when I was 28–but my relationship with him turns out to have been training for my relationship with my country. He and our nation are the same: restless, rambunctious and brilliant, but with a streak of something like rage that comes out now and then and is truly terrifying. The kind that, after a while, makes you want to keep your distance.

One thing I knew about my father was that he would protect me. This wasn’t theoretical. He pulled me out of many scrapes, from making amends with the local police for my reckless plinking with a pellet gun, to hauling me out of the Duke University hospital where I was sleeping away my sophomore year with mononucleosis brought on by long bouts of staying up too late and sleeping through classes.

I took his protection for granted. I see that now. I also take my country’s protection for granted. I am insanely grateful for the security both my father and my country have given me. Period. Full stop.

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t expect more. Security buys my gratitude, but not my love.

Love requires admiration. I didn’t admire the things I saw and later learned about my father’s darker impulses. The same is true for my country.

I never would have guessed some of the things he did, just as I never expected some of the things we Americans are doing now. He could be abusive. We, as a country, are being abusive too. To one another.

The thing about Dad’s misbehavior is that it was so out of character with the man I looked up to, the man he was most of the time. The same thing is happening with my country. I am shocked at the way we are treating one another. I thought we were better than we are acting now. 

I’ve never been a fan of nationalism. Not the kind that sends us to war, anyway. Of course we need to defend ourselves, but we didn’t need to invade Viet Nam or the Middle East. All we accomplished with those misadventures was making a sizable portion of the world that used to admire, or at least respect, us hate us.

As a young man, I moved to LA to get some space from Dad, to learn to be myself. To gain my independence. He died three years later. I often wonder what we would have thought of each other as he got older. What I would have said to him. And he to me. Whether I would have understood.

I won’t have that chance with him, but I do with my country. I’m trying to understand what is happening to us, but one thing I do know: we’re not behaving the way we ought to. We need to take to heart the advice my father, unironically, frequently gave me, which he no doubt picked up in his days in medical training on a US naval airbase: “Straighten up and fly right.”

The Beginning

The beginning of what?

The world has changed.

The way we see each other has changed.

Will we begin now to go back to the way we were?

How was that? Do we remember, or do we imagine?

We are children leaving home.

Restless to be free, unfettered by old bonds.

When our ecstasy subsides and the lightness leaves our step, will we rest and take stock of how far we have come?

Or will we stubbornly trudge on,

looking for something that, 

even as we search, 

we begin to understand we will never find?

A Memory Place

There’s a bench overlooking the beach in Carmel where I stop to sit sometimes and think about nothing. I suppose I never really think about nothing, just not anything in particular. Looking out over the ocean, I let my mind wander, and like the waves my thoughts ebb and flow and now and then wash up something that has been misplaced, a memory.

Underneath the bench is a mailbox. I ignored it the first few times I sat there. Well, that’s not exactly true. I thought it was private, like a real mailbox, and I shouldn’t look. Or maybe it was full of snakes, or drug needles, or condoms. Yesterday, I peeked inside. There was a bag of colored pencils and a half dozen journals. It was a memory box. I closed it without disturbing anything. I did let myself imagine what might be written there, and by whom. Love notes between young Romeos and Juliettes. Or private thoughts of those who had no one to tell them to, for whom a mailbox under a bench near a cypress tree was a confessional. 

A plaque on the bench says it was dedicated in May, 1992, the month and year my son Nicholas was born. I think of that time as a kind of re-beginning of our family’s life. We moved to a farm in Maryland, where Nick learned to call cows in to feed, his brother Chris grew pumpkins as big as he was, and Meg wrote her first novel. We only lived on that farm for three years, but it held onto our hearts for a long time. When that first novel was published years later, we went back there to celebrate it with our friends at the hunt club who had holes in their sweaters and drove old blue tractors to plow us out in snow storms. 

That was also about the time I really got to know Meg’s parents, Don and Anna Waite. We started going to Colorado with them every Christmas. I was a sketchy son-in-law, a divorced man marrying their metaphorically virginal daughter. But in those mountains, they took me in and made me feel part of their family. Anna made us needle point stockings, and Don got up to take Chris and Nick on the early shuttle to the ski slopes, his pockets stuffed with frozen Snickers bars, like treats for puppies.

The thoughts that lapped at me yesterday on that seaside bench were of dinners and brunches with them, of Waite family reunions, of trips and ball games, of Don walking down his driveway and into the street to signal that it was safe to back out after a visit, that no car was speeding around the curve. Their love and generosity are gently soothing tides, coming in and out steadily, dependably, no matter the time or season.

For me, immortality is in the memories of our loved ones. In recollections of laughter and joy, even pain, that are as beautiful as the pearly gates. As worn-smooth and durable as the lives that hold them. Benches by the sea, mailboxes stuffed with journals and colored pencils.

Riding With the Judge

I wonder why some people are so stupid. How can they fall for cons and conspiracy theories? Then I wonder if they think the same thing about me and my beliefs: how can I be so stupid?

Of course they do.

Which leads to the obvious question: which of us is right?

Some things seem so clear to me as to be beyond dispute. The sky is blue kinds of things. Facts.

Close behind are judgements any reasonable person would come to. We should not kill each other; it should not be so easy to buy an assault weapon to commit mass murder. We should not hurt each other by refusing in a public health emergency to roll up our sleeves and take a vaccine.

But many of us—not just the odd eccentric—believe things that make no sense to me. Yes on assault rifles, no on vaccines.

For a long time, I thought they were just idiots. There are so many of them now that I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t re-examine my assumptions about how we should think about things.

An easy answer would be: you think about things however you want to, and I’ll do the same. That would be fine if we didn’t need some agreed-upon principles on which to base our behavior and our public policy. We’re as far from anything like common ground as I have ever seen us. I’m not sure how we come back together. 

There’s a large and violently merry band of libertarians rampaging across the land. They remind me of the troop that followed the Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Merridian. He led them on nihilistic journey of slaughter and mayhem. To be fair, the Judge in McCarthy’s novel was the devil—not a metaphorical one, but the actual devil. Take your pick for candidates for the role today.

When the Judge and his band of hooligans ride into town, what are we to do? Say, “Listen fellows, let’s sit down and work this out over a beer.”? I don’t think so.

The underpinning for my sorting of views and people into sensible and not is reason. The Judge didn’t give a hoot for reason. His boys had guns. That was all the reason they needed.

Reason is suspended when we’re engaged in sex. Likewise when we’re in a fight. Too bad it’s not sex that’s distracting us now, rather than fighting. That would be more fun, and we’d all be a lot less grumpy.

Better, or Not

  friend:  the pandemic must be over, because the mass shootings have begun. what a fucked up country.

me:  it’s hard to be optimistic right now. but let me ask you this: are people generally better or worse off than 100 years ago?

friend:  well…he says reluctantly and without caps...better. but is that the right comparison?

That’s an exchange I had this morning with a friend. We’ve all gotten a little covid-curmudgeonly, but it's a fair question: are we better off when considered over the span of a century, and is that the right standard?

Most of us want to see progress continue in something like a straight line. That’s what I thought was happening when my friend and I were young. WW II was behind us, Europe was rebuilding; we shucked off Viet Nam and Jim Crow. 

Now I see that our society’s progress is like that of the stock market. The trend may be up, but when you’re in the middle of a painful setback, it can feel like the worst of times.

Jim Crow is back, wearing a suit this time. He’s just as dangerous…or is he? The contempt for blacks in the South of my youth wasn’t spoken in code words, it was right out there in plain language. If you were black, you bowed your head and stepped off the sidewalk when a white man passed.

We didn’t have mass shootings back then, but the violent streak that underlies them was certainly there. Bar fights and the occasional lynching were the outlets.

I just read The Cold Millions, a novel by Jess Walter that paints a frightening picture of labor oppression and police brutality in Spokane a hundred years ago. You wouldn’t want to live through that. Is it worse today on the South Side of Chicago? Maybe, maybe not.

We can’t get away with casual cruelty as easily now as then. There may be just as much of it, but it is called out more often. Racist attacks and sexual abuse, so common a mere generation ago, are less tolerated. Reckonings come more often, and more swiftly.

Maybe the reason things seem so bad sometimes is that we are learning to expect better. We won’t tolerate being kicked around as easily as we have in the past. We have voices. We demand to be heard.

This creates quite a lot of noise, but that’s what it takes to make change. Nothing is gained that is not demanded.

It’s a shame that we never seem to reach our goal of a more just and equal society. We may never. But little by little we are making better communities for ourselves by demanding them. 

It’s exhausting to keep it up, but it must be done.

Pretty Fly for an Old White Guy

I just saw a headline saying President Biden has rolled out the most aggressive climate change agenda of any president. Other headlines have noted his plans to deal with racial and economic inequality. He wants to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure. He wants to rebuild our relationships with our allies. 

If we progressives aren’t cheering, I don’t know why. We may have feared Biden would be a milquetoast, but in his policies he’s roaring like a liberal lion. And he’s staffing our government with experienced, smart people who can make his plans happen. And he’s doing it all fast.

I didn’t even mention his COVID response. He’s doing what the federal government should have been doing all along. It’s just that we got so far off course with you-know-who in charge that ordinary competence seems like a miracle.

It’s a great relief to believe again that our government is doing the right thing.

Biden will be a good technocrat, to use a popular term I don’t particularly like, but I think he’ll be much more than that. In his first week in office, he has shown himself to be humane, determined and decisive. All without polemic. 

Remember the old saying that only Nixon could go to China? (He was on record as strongly anti-communist, so when he traveled to China and restored our relations with it, no one could say he was soft of the Reds.) Well, maybe only a man with well-established moderate leanings could act so boldly now on so many progressive fronts.

It’s early days. Mitch and his gang are still going to be obstructionists. They hated deficits before they loved them, and now they hate them again. Congress will do what it always does when it’s so evenly divided: as little as possible, and that grudgingly. But president Biden is running the Executive Branch, and he will run it for the benefit of all of us, including especially those who have not had their voices heard for too long.

For the first time in four years, I’m going to stop worrying about my government and return to pursuits that are more personal and, though perhaps no easier to achieve, make me feel like I can accomplish something again, and that it won’t be a waste of time because at any moment I might have to flee the land of my birth where for the last four years I'd heard the drumbeats of fascism that Europeans heard in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power and began to marginalize and purge anyone he didn’t like, all to the enthusiastic salutes and rapturous cheers of ordinary Germans seduced by his cult of himself above all else.

The Way We Were

I want my country back.

I’ll admit I’m not completely certain what that means anymore. 

Am I longing for the white-male-chauvanist orderliness of my youth? No, we have to get past that, and we are, and of course rearranging our political and social norms on the scale that we are now engaged in is going to upset some people, maybe most people, but we have to persist. The people who have not had a voice must now be heard, and we must listen.

That’s not what is going on at this moment, though. The anger boiling into our streets, and into our Capitol, is not a cry for mercy and justice. It is the death rage of a group who are losing their grip on power and are digging in to keep it. White supremacists is not too harsh a label for them. Not just for the Proud Boys among them, but as well for the huge number of ordinary citizens who have been quick to pour out their hatred on social media and in public squares, who are ready to take up arms to protect their increasingly marginalized place in America.

They have been inspired and encouraged by our president. He is our very own modern Jefferson Davis. 

Without an actual civil war, he has been defeated. But he leaves behind an angry mob that must be sent back home, or if they won’t go home peacefully, jailed.

We have to stop tolerating the hatred our president has encouraged.

He should be impeached. I doubt he’ll be convicted (even though I think he should be), but he should be barred, under the 14th Amendment, from ever holding federal office again.

Those who rioted in the Capitol should be arrested and tried.

The members of the House and Senate who on January 6 challenged the certification of the presidential election, after those results had been certified by the respective states and all judicial challenges dismissed, should be barred from serving in Congress.

Insurrections must have consequences. Any governor and any parent can tell you that.

Social media must stop allowing itself to be a bulletin board for hatred. 

We have to calm down and go back to striving to be a nation of mutual respect and cooperative industriousness.

That’s the country I want back.

Friends

When we were in college together, one of my oldest friends and I dated girls in the same dorm. They said they would look out the window and see us coming across the quad, he swaying from side to side as he walked, me bouncing on my toes. They said it was comical.

He greatly expanded my vocabulary and taught me that A-1 sauce is brilliant on french fries. We hung out together, dropped out together, resurrected ourselves separately, lost touch, and finally reconnected a few years ago.

One of my newest friends and I walk together too, or did pre-Covid. He taught me about Asia, both past and present, beginning with my attendance at his defense of his master’s thesis on early trade in China, something he undertook late in life. Such a thing would be way too ambitious for me—I still have test nightmares (see above about dropping out)—but his scholarship introduced me to his deep knowledge of the area and his charming way of imparting it.

So: a much better vocabulary at a young age and an appreciation for the varied uses of A-1 sauce from one friend; knowledge of half the world I knew little about from another. Pretty good bookends for me.

I have other friends I’ve learned from, lots of them, but not many I’ve stuck with. Sometimes that’s just my bad luck. I’ve changed jobs or locations. Sometimes the learning became too tedious.

A friendship is like a good long book. It’s comfortable, you enjoy it, and you learn something every time you pick it up. You need all three elements for it to last.

Good dinner-table repartee can be stimulating, occasionally even exhilarating, especially after a few glasses of wine have fortified your views and loosened your tongue, but it’s not always comfortable for the long term. Indeed, the thrill and tension of it make it a rich emotional diet. It’s a Gran Marnier soufflé: delicious in the moment, but too much trouble to make and too many calories for daily consumption.

I have common ground with these two friends, one old and one new, but we’re not in an echo chamber. They’re curious about why things and people are the way they are. Being curious is pretty much the opposite of being certain.

Sure, we kid around about what morons some people seem to be, especially lately when discussing politics, but they would welcome the opportunity to look into the hearts of those on the other side of any issue. They aren’t afraid of what they might find there.

There’s not a whole lot of looking into hearts going on in broad social and political discourse these days. We’re mostly left to deal in generalities and caricatures.

Friends are the opposite of generalities and caricatures. They are specific and nuanced.

I have no illusion that the way I relate to two friends works on a broader, more anonymous scale. Maybe that’s all there is to it. We learn from and grow with our friends and navigate the rest of the world the way one navigates a mountain trail: watching our footing, alert to danger, enjoying the scenery, but not really anxious to camp out full-time in the wilderness.